Wednesday, March 19, 2014

Bellow on Poverty Law, 1964-65, and a Bibliography on the War on Poverty

[H-Law has scooped me on a development at my own law school! According to a recent message to the listserv:]

As one of the contributions marking the 50th anniversary of the War on Poverty, the National Equal Justice Library has launched a blog earlier this year, Right On. In the most recent blog entry, Reflections on a Bibliography, Fifty Years Later, Elisa Minoff writes about a bibliography that Gary Bellow, supported by a group of students, compiled for a seminar on "Poverty and the Administration of Justice," taught at Georgetown Law in the 1964-65. The course was conceived to stimulate "law students in becoming more concerned with the legal problems of the poor and the urban condition." Minoff's article serves as an excellent guide through Bellows' broadly conceived readings, which represent the state of popular and scholarly writing about poverty in the mid 1960s, while giving a "taste of the ambition of practitioners like Bellow who were considering how to use the law in the fight against poverty," she writes.

The collaborative War on Poverty bibliography, developed fifty years after Bellow's Selected Readings in Law and Poverty, follows Bellow's spirit by approaching scholarship on poverty and the War on Poverty from a broad perspective. Elisa Minoff, who has conceptualized and developed the initial bibliography, aimed to highlight some of the most enduring scholarship on the War on Poverty and to present the most recent work being done by social scientists, legal scholars, and historians on the subject. For context, Minoff includes a list of useful sources on social welfare in America before and after the War on Poverty, as well as some recent analyses of the legacies of the War on Poverty. A section with literature covering the most significant poverty law cases is also planned.

The bibliography is designed to be an ongoing collaborative effort, and anyone is encouraged to contribute additional entries, and well as annotations to existing and new entries.

If you would like to contribute citations and commentary, please e-mail Elisa at elisa.minoff [at] gmail.com. Elisa can either give you permission to edit the document directly or add your suggested citations herself.